Sunday, April 27, 2008

The Missing UFOs

UFOs seem to have appeared to early man, as portrayed in cave paintings and other petroglyphs, and a UFO presence is palpable in Sumerian and Biblical accounts about 10,000 B.C.

Sporadic UFO accounts may be found in Biblical literature right up into the time of Jesus/Christ and for a period shortly thereafter.

Constantine’s UFO observation of 312 A.D. appears to be the last significant recorded sighting until the Nuremberg UFO “battle” of 1561.

UFOs remained rather quiescent until about 1890; that is, nothing blatantly unidentified is reported for the lacunae between 312 and 1561 and 1561 until 1890.

Our concern here is the dearth of UFO-like accounts in psychiatric circles for the period between 1890 and 1963, when psychoanalysts and other practitioners of the mental arts, including Freud and Jung, among others, were treating patients for hallucinations and perception anomalies, even dreams where one would think a few abduction-like anecdotes would have surfaced.

But no persons seeking psychiatric help recounts a UFO experience or anything resembling an abduction event.

Scouring the extant psychological literature for the period mentioned, we found no references, not one, that resembles the early UFO accounts in the Bible and none mimic the classic accounts from the modern era of UFOs.

It wasn’t until Betty and Barney Hill’s scenario was outed by their psychiatrist, and taken up as a template by hypnotists and pseudo-psychologists thereafter that UFOs got the on-the-couch treatment.

UFOs were not visible or recorded for those long periods we cite above, but during the heyday of psychoanalysis, 1890 to the early 1960s, flying saucers were prominent in he public/media mind.

Yet, no one under treatment for mental aberrations or emotional problems presented flying disks or UFOs as the progenitor of their plight.

After the Hill episode, however, one can a raft of UFO accounts that seem ideal for psychiatric scrutiny, many brought forth by amateur and professional hypnotists, seriously and haphazardly.

Where were UFOs during the open-spaces from during the Dark Ages and after the Renaissance?

And where were UFOs in the psychiatric arena when they were prominent is the public psyche, especially after 1947?

4 Comments:

The problem may lie with the literature, or rather how it is described in the literature. Here are just a few...

August 7, 1566 - Basel, Switzerland bore witness to a "battle" between black spheres that appeared before dawn. Samuel Coccius, a student of liberal arts, wrote "many became red and fiery, ending by being consumed and vanishing".

December 5, 1577 - Locals of Tubingen, Germany claim to have seen tall, wide "hats" in various colors (but mostly black) that came out of unusual "fiery" clouds.

December 9, 1731 - Sheffield England was the location of sighting by Thomas Short. He wrote about a "dark red cloud, below which was a luminous body which emitted intense beams of light. The light beams moved slowly for a while, then stopped. Suddenly it became so hot that I could take off my shirt even though I was out of doors". The object remained stationary for approximately 2 hours. This same phenomenon was witnessed over Ireland later that same day and a similar sighting cropped up from Romania the day after.

January 2, 1878 - The Denison Daily News ran a report from a local farmer, John Martin. This man claimed to see a dark object - roughly spheroid in shape - high in the sky where it appeared the size of an orange (from his perspective) but later descended as near to him to seem as large as a large "saucer" but still very high off the ground.

It may be that the reports are there but that they are obfuscated by the perceptions of the day. This, unfortunately, requires us to "read" into them, posing a host of new problems with which we must wrestle.